From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-09-19T21:13:22+09:00 Subject: Re: Capcha in ruby On 9/19/05, Robbie Carlton wrote: > But they stop the average spambot, which is what they're for I think. > The simplest accessible alternative would be email verification, but this > obviously slows the whole thing down. > Has anyone thought of an accessible alternative that can be embedded on the > page? Two things. First, they don't work against the average spambot of 2005 or later. The average spambot of 2005 has gocr or something like that built in. (I'm using spambot because that's what you're using; what you're talking about is actually crawlers and registration bots.) The problem with CAPTCHA systems is that something complex enough to defeat a computer OCR system will be enough to lock out a significant portion of your potential users. Second, a lot of people *have* thought about it. I'm unimpressed with most solutions. http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2005/01/01/11-captcha http://www.petefreitag.com/item/376.cfm http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/captcha.php http://www.bestkungfu.com/archive/date/2005/01/captcha-state-of-the-union-2005/ http://www.bestkungfu.com/?p=445 Basically, my advice is to forget CAPTCHA and go with double verification. You can even provide multiple levels of user accessibility, allowing immediate access but nothing that could be construed as spam until they have verified their identity in some way that is accessible. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca